Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/247

Rh are taken is a very wooden affair; it is rigid and straightlined, instead of varying in irregular curves after a natural fashion; yet it may serve to present concrete illustrations of the successive stages through which the Meriden district has passed; and when thus viewed, the interest of the place grows wonderfully.

 between crystalline plateaus on east (E. PI.) and west (W. PI.), to illustrate the general structure of the Connecticut Triassic belt. Relative breadth much reduced. The supposed underground structure is shown in a vertical section in the foreground, and the inferred overground structure (now lost by erosion) in a vertical section in the background. A strip of actual surface lies between the two sections. The even peneplain, to which the whole mass was first reduced, is shown by dotted lines at the level of the eastern (E. PI.) and western (W. PI.) crystalline plateaus.

Its scenery is not grand or magnificent; many other regions exceed it in height of mountains or depth of valleys; but it has a fine story to tell about its lost volcanoes, and it tells the story with great distinctness and emphasis when the listener passes by.

literary discoveries have attended the labors of Egyptologists during the present year. In January was announced the recovery of nearly a complete copy of the lost work of Aristotle on the Constitution of Athens—a document which throws new light on important events in Grecian history from the time of Solon down to the age of Pericles. The examination of the papyrus leaves of which certain coffins found at Tel Gurot, in the Fayoum, were made, has resulted in the recovery of several fragments of ancient literature of greater or less value; the most notable of which are a large part of a lost play, Antiope, of Euripides, and of parts of the Phædo of Plato, of a copy nearly contemporaneous with the authors, and furnishing a purer text than those from which the modern editions of this work are derived. Much was expected from the papyri found with the one hundred and sixty-three priestly mummies which were discovered last spring at Deir-el-Bahari, near Thebes; but, so far as they have been examined, they have afforded nothing more valuable than funereal texts.